Celebrating diversity

Well, that’s it then. As from today, I am no longer the Allerton Project’s Head of Research. I will be continuing to facilitate the local farmer cluster and related landscape scale initiatives, as well as spending more time on my own farm, working with my wife as we do our best to meet environmental and economic objectives, and perhaps some social ones too.

We have achieved some great things at the Allerton Project in the past three decades. Our research has helped to influence management at the farm scale across countless farms in the UK and abroad, as well as informing national policy on a range of issues.

The farm at Loddington supports a good range of bird species, largely due to the diversity of habitats across the farm. By applying an evidence based targeted approach to management, we doubled the abundance of those birds.

Our approach is not about food production or wildlife, or other environmental considerations; it is the integration of all of these, often with small, very different components playing an important role. Small pockets of semi-natural habitat in the landscape have been important for species diversity of wild bees, and small carefully sited ponds have been instrumental in increasing the number of aquatic plant species at the landscape scale.

Diversity has also been a feature of our research programme. We have covered topics as wide ranging as songbird ecology, beneficial predatory invertebrates and pollinators, soil health and management, arable crops and grasses, aquatic ecology, catchment processes and flood risk management, greenhouse gas emissions, agroforestry, and ruminant nutrition. And social science has been in the mix too, recognising the wide-ranging attitudes, approaches and aspirations of individual farmers. All this in the context of food-producing farming systems. We have only achieved this by collaborating with a wide range of specialist researchers from universities and other organisations.

I am grateful to have been working within an organisation that has not been too constrained by cultural norms, allowing individuals to work in ways that enable them to be creative and optimise their own performance. The value of neurodiversity is increasingly recognised.

There are some amazing young (and some not so young) people taking up the reins, with a diverse range of skills and working methods. If I have one tip for them, it is this: don’t be afraid to push at boundaries and make mistakes, but be sure to learn from them. Remember those lessons, and, importantly, forget the mistakes!

Thanks to all those knowledgeable, skilful and sometimes gloriously individual research partners and colleagues who have contributed so much to Allerton Project research over the years, and good luck to those who are taking the research programme forwards.